5-15-21 (2 min, 15 sec)
Among other things, pressing on my mind about six weeks ago was…
shelving.
More specifically, measurements for the shelving we were planning to have our carpentry-kiddo build in our new basement.
I know, tell me about it. HARDLY worth waking someone up at night. But it did. Wake me up.
We had a narrow window of time to build the shelving immediately after moving into our new place. I had been worrying….how high should the shelving be, and how many levels did we need to accommodate the sea of plastic totes that we own? I was concerned …how wide and how deep should the wooden shelves be to store all of our clear, labeled containers?
How high? How wide? How deep?…the intensity of my sub-waking thoughts made me fitful.
High, wide, deep…tossing in bed, my eyes fluttered open…
How high, wide, and deep…is the love of God?
This was my first fully awake, coherent thought.
And with a startling realization that early morning, I recognize like I didn’t know the dimensions of the shelves for our storage area, I don’t really know, haven’t even begun to grasp, the dimensions of God’s love for me.
The scope of the love of God. Dimensions worth pondering.
I’ve been ruminating much the last month over the depth and breadth of God’s love for me.
And then last week, a series of texts with the sweetest of bible study friends that I haven’t seen or talked with for sixteen years. It was delightful to reconnected and to catch up on a small scale. But her closing words from her last text were still on my mind a week later:
“God continues to show His pure sweetness to me, reminding me daily of His great love for me. Thankful.”
And like a static-y sock sticking to a sweater, I couldn’t shake myself from her words. Because I’m struggling with comprehending the love of God for me, and it sounds like she understands something of His great love that maybe I don’t.
So I text her again to probe for treasures. What has the Lord been teaching her about His sweetness, about His great love for her?
In humility, she responded that she is “a work in progress to sit in His lavish love.”
Aha. Sitting in His lavish love. Abiding. An excellent place to start.
And she generously shared biblical truth that the Lord has used to minister deeply to her heart as she has grown in understanding the depth and breadth of God’s love for her. Specifically:
I am His daughter.
I need not fear.
His lovingkindness is great.
He continually restores me to Himself.
His provision for me is extravagant and so very undeserved.
We are invited to His table not as servants or guests but as daughters of the most high King.
These reminders are God’s pure sweetness to me.
Iron sharpens iron.
May God, according to the riches of His glory, grant us strength with power through His Spirit in our inner beings, so that Christ may dwell in our hearts through faith – that we, being rooted and grounded in love, may have strength to comprehend with all the saints what is the breadth and length and height and depth, and to know the love of Christ that surpasses knowledge, that we may be filled with all the fullness of God. (Ephesians 3:16-19)